FSP 1.1

The day the music died.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, who oversees the U.S. Copyright Office,
set the royalty standards last month, provoking cries of protest from small
Internet radio stations that say the fees will force them to
pull the plug on webcasts.

software engineering

Tom DeMarco has a theory that software projects can
be estimated accurately, but if managers were to give
true estimates to upper mgmt, the projects would never
be approved, hence you pitch an unrealistically
short/cheap project then get extensions.

This is not what we mean by an iterative development lifecycle.

play money

In January of last year, Sony Online Entertainment, which runs
EverQuest, prevailed on eBay and Yahoo to cancel all auctions
of EverQuest items, asserting that the transactions were a
violation of the game's end-user licensing agreement, which
states that Verant Interactive, a Sony subsidiary, "shall retain
ownership of all intellectual property rights."

"From the player's standpoint, I can understand that there's
an eminent domain issue, which is basically, `I produced the
goods, so I can do what I want,' " said Edward Castronova,
an associate professor of economics at California State University
at Fullerton who has written a paper on EverQuest called
"Virtual Worlds: A Firsthand Account of Market and Society
on the Cyberian Frontier." "But the game runners have a
public-goods argument. They need to create an atmosphere
of play for the collective good, and if they allow the buying
and selling of items, that collective good could be ruined."

MARC WEINGARTEN.

squeak

An interesting history of the smalltalk computer language
and longer paper Alan Kay, "The Early History of Smalltalk"[.PDF].

[Thanks to Marcel Weiher for this pointer.]

must know 2002

The must know list for 2002:

Web services are based on a series of industry-standard protocols —

XML, SOAP, WDSL and UDDI — for describing, identifying and
communicating data over the Web.

streaming music

Update 2002 Nov 30: SOMA FM is back on air.

Squid radio		Soma FM's CliqHop

DOH covalent

Click for more detail and larger picture.

Covalent uses Netscape Server to promote Apache.

Larry and Napster

Napster, my favourite sonic recycling tool

PW: I like to think of this as the Napster recession. If you plot the stock markets before 2001 September 11th, you can see that the crucial court rulings are almost like hinge points where the market bends up or down. The stock prices go up after a favorable ruling for Napster and drop afterwards. It's probably a bit silly to ascribe all of the market's zeitgeist to one company, but the end of Napster is really the biggest roadblock for the personal computer. Until Napster crashed, everyone kept predicting more, bigger and better things for the humming space heaters under the desks. LL: This is an important and under discussed point. We have seen a dramatic crash in the market. Why? Most attribute it exclusively to "irrational expectations." But meanwhile there has been a very dramatic change in the legal environment within which the take-off occurred. This change must have had an effect. PW: We've also lost the rational exuberance. Now, we've got to ask mother-may-I before developing any neat software? Why bother? Can we blame Hollywood for this? LL: While it would be irresponsible to try to say with any precision how much is a function of the content industry lawyers, it is also irresponsible not to at least acknowledge that some part of this decline is due to the different way the law regulates the net. Laws protecting dinosaurs from the content industry are killing the opportunity for growth. Why? Only because the only thing worse than well paid lobbyists is well paid lobbyists with movie stars.

(Peter Wayner and Lawrence Lessig) -- full interview [slashdot].

use the false loop

Open source's metric is attracting developers;
Commercial software's metric is attracting users.

Which method should produce the most user friendly software ?